Trying to Teach Testing Skills and Judgement

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Since 2011, Rikard has spent 1500 hours of actively teaching software testing to higher vocational students in Sweden. It is educations spanning 1 to 2 years aimed at providing professionals that the industry needs. Rikard and his colleague Henrik Emilsson set out to enable the students to master the activity of testing. They tried to create courses that let the students capture both explicit knowledge like testing techniques, but also tacit skills and judgments like these:

Asking the right questions

Critical thinking

Understanding what is important

Rapid learning

Seeing many perspective and test ideas

Selecting effective test strategies

Capturing serendipity

Realizing when testing is good enough

In this eBook Rikard shares their teaching philosophy and practice, including typical exercises and assignments, from simpler missions to authentic problems, using diverse targets like custom applications, open source software and thinking problems. He also explains how he as a teacher gives feedback to drive the learning in good directions.

He doesn’t have any proof that these methods are better than others, but he hopes that sharing their stories can help others advance the craft. This experience report cover both on-site and distance courses, and includes examples and exercises he hopes will inspire you.

Rikard Edgren, a humanistic and technical tester with an educational background in Philosophy and Music. Has 16 years of experience of software testing from a wide range of contexts. Has been involved in 5 different higher vocational studies programs for software testers, and have also held classes at companies.

He is a regular at (inter)national conferences, with six appearances at EuroSTAR. Member of the think-tank The Test Eye, co-author of Software Quality Characteristics, author of Den Lilla Svarta om Teststrategi (in Swedish) and co-organizer of SWET, Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing. Currently working as test consultant at LearningWell, Sweden.

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